The Media Are the Message

Marty Kaplan
HuffPost

They lost control of the message.

That's now become the universal diagnosis of Team Obama's mistake during the stimulus bill debate. From the commentariat to the White House chief of staff, the lesson to be learned from the last two weeks, we are told, is that the administration let the Republicans frame the debate.

Now I can understand why Rahm Emanuel would say that to a bunch of reporters. A mea culpa about last week is the price for moving the topic this week to the foreclosure crisis. If the White House hadn't declared that the precipitous end of the honeymoon was its own damn fault, the press corps would have kept gnawing at that bone, and would have turned the stimulus debate into Exhibit A of the obituary of Change We Can Believe In. But because Emanuel copped to losing control of the message, the media finally permitted the Democrats to declare that the passage of the bill -- the nation's single largest investment in infrastructure, education and scientific research since the Depression -- was in fact a victory, and to reboot for round two.

What's so discomfiting about this transaction is what it says about the role that the media have carved out for themselves in American public life.

If the job of the press were to help the public understand what's really important, and to distinguish propaganda from facts, then Republican attempts to sink the bill by defining it as liberal pork would have gone nowhere. The endangered mouse that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was allegedly earmarking billions to protect; the Las Vegas supertrain that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was claimed to have snuck in; the rationing of health care that former New York Lieut. Gov. Betsy McCaughey accused Tom Daschle of hiding in the bill: None of these and other colorful lies would have gained any traction if truth value were a prerequisite for airtime. Instead, unfortunately, the more outrageous the allegation, the more irresistible it was to the media.

(More here.)